They were Dancing in the Streets already in September

By Roy Gutman, President and CEO, BCFA

December 11, 2024

One of the first signs that it was time for Syrians to try toppling their government came in September.  That’s when Israel launched its all-out assault against Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia that had been firing rockets into Israel. Israel began by detonating thousands of Hezbollah pagers and walkie talkies, killing or maiming hundreds of Hezbollah fighters. Then on Sept 27 its warplanes blew up the underground bunker where Hezbollah’s leader was conferring with top aides.

They were dancing in the streets of Idlib, the north Syrian city that is home to the biggest anti-Assad militia. Locals fired their guns in the air and set off fireworks to celebrate. Syrians viewed Hezbollah as the most effective outside ground force available to prop up Syrian dictator Bashar Al Assad against the rebellion that began in 2011.

Those celebrating were largely internally displaced persons, of whom there are 7.9 million IDP’s inside Syria. In addition, some 6.3 million Syrians became refugees abroad, for a total of 14.2 million forced displaced — more than half the population of 24 million.    

Much of Assad’s conscript army deserted their units in the national uprising, and Iran came to the rescue by deploying Hezbollah and other foreign militias into Syria. Hezbollah intervened directly in 2013 and filled in for Assad’s army again and again. In 2016 it became the principal outside force in the regime’s siege and capture of Aleppo. It operates under Iranian command and with Iranian arms and training, and now Israel was destroying it before everyone’s eyes.

The Israeli assault on Hezbollah was a turning point, but Abu Mohammad al Jolani, the leader of the Islamist HTS, the most powerful group of rebels in Idlib, held back the operation. For one thing Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan was trying to negotiate a return to normal relations with Assad, in hopes of creating conditions suitable for the return of some of the three million plus Syrian refugees in his country. He had the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Erdogan carries great clout among the Syrian militias in landlocked Idlib province, for Turkiye controls the flow of supplies and people across the border. Turkiye occupies a chunk of territory inside Syria and it controls the Syrian National Army, a militia built from the remnants of the Free Syrian Army. Erdogan also has the military means to intervene should he choose.

But Assad resisted a deal with Turkey.

Israel meanwhile launched a major attack against Iran in late October, taking out targets in Iran, Syria and Iraq and weakening Tehran’s ability to come to Assad’s aid.

When Israel finally reached a cease-fire agreement with Hezbollah on November 27, Jolani launched the operation.

In just 11 days, his HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or Organization for the Liberation of the Levant) and other militias captured Aleppo, Hama, Homs and the capital of Damascus, bringing down the Assad regime.

Who is Jolani?

Jolani is a Syrian whose family is originally from the Golan Heights on the border with Israel. He was recruited at Aleppo university to fight with Al Qaida against the U.S. conquest of Iraq in 2003, was later arrested and held by U.S. forces at Camp Bucca. 

After Syrians took to the streets in 2011 to demand Assad’s ouster, Jolani returned to Syria with a small group of Al Qaida fighters. The Assad regime’s intelligence services had facilitated Jolani’s jihad in Iraq, and the regime knew when he and others returned from there. But it allowed them to enter, to circulate, and establish their own militias.

In April 2013 Al Qaida returnees formed the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS, but Jolani and his men chose a different path. Unlike ISIS, which targeted rebel forces and Syrian civil society, Jolani positioned his followers to fight the Assad regime in parallel to secular Syrian rebels. He called his group Jabhat al Nusra (the Syrian Conquest Front) and affiliated with Al Qaida even as Al Qaida split with ISIS.

In 2016, when moderate rebels lost Aleppo and seemed headed for defeat, Jolani announced he was breaking his ties with Al Qaida. He renamed his group Jabhat Fateh al Sham – the Syrian Conquest Front — and a year later rebranded again as HTS.

His group has been on the U.S. list of Terrorist Organizations since May 2014, but it’s not clear why as there were no allegations of an attack or plans for an attack against U.S. or foreign targets under any of the three names.

Jolani has run Idlib, the region he dominates, at times with an iron fist, but his public statements, from November 27 when the operation began, through December 8, when Damascus fell, have emphasized tolerance and protection for Syria’s religious minorities.

Syria’s future

Syrians face enormous challenges as they try to build a government after more than a half century of police state rule by the Assad family. One looming concern is the international leadership vacuum. There’s no sign of the United States playing its traditional role of bringing together its allies in the region – the Arab states, Turkiye and Israel – to a common stance on how to help Syria become a functioning democracy.

This opens the possibility of competing policies pressed by different powers, each with its own interests and agenda. Turkiye sees the Kurdish force that controls one third of Syria – with U.S. military backing — as a threat to the Turkish state because of their intimate ties with the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK, operating out of northern Iraq.  Israel has seized territory on the Golan Heights, and has been bombing the Syrian navy and weapons depots inside Syria, clearly without the authority of anyone in Syria.

Arab states made a series of bad bets. The Arab states welcomed Assad back to the Arab League and were working to restore full relations, ignoring the fact that fighting was still going on in different parts of the country. Then, as Jolani began his assault on Aleppo, the United Arab Emirates announced it was offering a financial lifeline to Assad.

European States are eager to send back Syrian refugees at the earliest possible opportunity, in what appears to be undue haste. Meanwhile, Russia will no doubt seek to keep its air and naval bases, set up by agreement with the Assad dynasty. Moscow’s strongest argument will be that it deserted Assad during his hour of need – except for some airstrikes against civilians and rebels

All these countries can bring pressures or financial resources to bear on an interim government as it makes vital decisions on its next steps.

Recalling the scene in Idlib where crowds cheered Israel’s pummeling of Hezbollah in September, the best hope for Syria may lie in the Syrian people, who took to the street throughout the country in 2011, turned out en masse as the Assad regime fell and are no doubt ready to take to the street again if their interim government falls short of expectations.

Jolani’s HTS was far from the only force that arrived in Damascus December 8, for there were numerous militias from elsewhere in the north and even from Dara’a in the south, where the Arab Spring revolt began. If the protests remain nonviolent, and Syrian leaders can agree on the preliminary steps to setting up a government, there is a chance at least in the short term that Syria can emerge as a stable state.

(Roy Gutman is President of the Baltimore Council. He reported on the Syrian war from 2012 to 2018 as a foreign correspondent for the McClatchy Newspaper chain, The Daily Beast The Los Angeles Times and The Nation. He has written a book about the rise of ISIS during the war in Syria.).